1:13:41-1:17:14 — Act III opens with Goth on his balcony on a fine sunny morning, shirtless, watching over his labor camp. Schindler’s business may have just failed, but Goth’s is off to a swell start and he’s feeling his oats. Everyone we “know” is lined up for roll call — another roll call, another list of names. Spielberg begins each act of Schindler’s List with a scene like this, as though re-introducing us to the cast, catching us up on who’s alive and who is not, reciting their names over and over.

Goth, anxious to make his authority clear, decides to shoot a few workers from his balcony. This wakes up the blond in his bed, who is appalled at his behavior. It becomes clear that, for Goth, the gun is a penis substitute — when he’s finished shooting Jews, he goes into the bedroom and “discharges his shell” onto the blond’s naked breasts, then goes to urinate in the bathroom.

1:17:14-1:21:30 — Schindler comes to Plaszow to re-close the deal. He meets with some of his Nazi friends. Helen Hirsch, who will figure significantly in the act, is there serving. Schindler, livid about his business closing, nevertheless plays politics and jokes with the Nazis — they are his clients, after all, there’s no point in making them angry.

Once he gets alone with Goth, however, Schindler’s true feelings come out. In a parallel scene to one in Act I with Stern, Schindler cuts a deal with Goth to re-start his business. Instead of cajoling Stern, however, here he schools Goth, insisting that his business concerns trump whatever Goth’s objectives are in Krakow.

(Which raises the question: what are Goth’s objectives in Krakow? Yes, he’s a Nazi, we know that — but what does Goth want? Because Goth has the burden of standing in for “all Nazis”, the temptation is to say that Goth wants “to kill all the Jews.” Which is an over-simplification. Which is not to say that Goth does not want “to kill all the Jews,” but only to say that that is not his stated objective in Krakow. Goth’s stated objective is to run his work camp efficiently and thus gain favor from his superiors. His murder of random workers is, in his mind anyway, subservient to his goal of running his work camp efficiently. Plaszow was certainly a horrible place, but it was not a death camp — extermination was someone else’s job.)

(Of course, in practice Goth’s objective is to use his position of power, as camp commander, to terrify and kill — a psychological goal unrelated to gaining promotion.  One of Schindler’s blunders is to confuse Goth’s stated objective with his real objective, to confuse a monster with a human being.)

Schindler demands his workers back from Goth. Is he concerned for them personally, or is he primarily concerned about profit? I would say that profit is still his primary goal here. Polish workers, we have learned, cost more than Jewish workers (probably more so, now that Jewish workers don’t exist in Krakow anymore). Plus, if he re-staffed his factory he’d have to re-train everyone and incur all the start-up costs associated with that. The first half of Schindler’s List takes great care to show that Schindler isn’t some kind of Jew-lover — if anything, it repeatedly shows him to be a dyed-in-the-wool pragmatist who treats everyone equally — that is, in terms of how they can benefit his agenda. He goes to the Krakow ghetto looking for investors in Act I because he knows that these people are in a bind and will be looking to turn their currency into things, not because he loves Jews or hates them. (And, as we shall see, he will soon be the one turning things into lives.)

Goth agrees to let Schindler have his workers back — at a price, the price being regular kickbacks and gratuities. Goth, we see, is not just a black-hearted Jew-hating Nazi: he’s also a corrupt businessman. Goth’s corruption slid right by me in my first few viewings of Schindler’s List, but it makes perfect sense when you view the character as a reflection of Schindler — they’re both pragmatic businessmen who owe their very careers to wartime excess, running factories, only with different attitudes toward their workers.

1:21:30-1:23:04 – The workers come back to work at Schindler’s enamelware factory and he is back in business. The difference is, Stern now cooks the books for Goth instead of for Schindler — Schindler is, if I understand the situation correctly, re-defining his position as a contractor by sub-contracting under Goth’s command. The enamelware factory is now Goth’s, and Goth is letting Schindler keep some (most, actually) of the profits.

1:23:04-1:26:10 – There’s a big party at Goth’s house — to celebrate Goth’s new deal with Schindler? Schindler is there, drinking and womanizing right alongside Goth. He takes time to go talk to Stern, as Stern will not be allowed back to the enamelware factory. Stern tries to tell Schindler all the things he needs to attend to in order to keep the business running smoothly, but Schindler can’t keep it all straight. “It gives me a headache!” he whines — Schindler’s unwillingness to master a few business concepts (like “bookkeeping”) take precedence over Stern’s predicament — if the business goes poorly, Schindler may have to go back to Germany but Stern will most likely be executed. Nevertheless, Schindler is developing a soft spot for Stern in his situation and gives him some delicacies from the party — delicacies Stern most likely created the capital to Schindler to buy them with. Stern, noting the change in Schindler’s attitude, almost thanks him for the gesture.

(Don’t forget, Stern is our “moral compass” for the movie — until Stern approves of Schindler, we cannot approve of him either.)

1:26:10-1:38:30 — This middle chunk of the act is all about setting up the notion of trading things for lives. It’s a series of short stories, really, telling us an anecdote about one worker, then another, then another, and then showing how that worker gained a position, through Stern, at Schindler’s factory.

The first story we see is about Levertov. Levertov works in the metalworks at Plaszow, and Goth, looking to make some labor cuts, picks a gripe with Levertov’s output. He drags him out back (with a trainyard looming ominously in the background) and tries to shoot him in the head. His gun will not fire, and the guns of his underlings refuse to fire as well. (Goth, of course, has no legitimate complaint against Levertov — he’s addicted to murdering people and he’s been put in a position where he may do so freely, and so he will find any excuse he can in order to do so. Ifan excuse does not exist, he will make one up. If one cannot be made up, he’ll do it anyway.) The sudden dysfunctional-gun epidemic is played as a kind of dark comedy, and plays up Goth’s impotence. It’s one thing if Goth must use a gun to take the place of his penis, but how doubly frustrating it must be for him to not be able to shoot a gun as well. The scene is so patently absurd that I have to assume that it actually happened.

The next thing we know, Schindler delivers a plush new saddle to Goth as a kickback and gives a valuable lighter to Stern. Stern gives the lighter to Goldberg (the “bad Jew” from Act I), Goldberg puts Levertov’s name on “the good list” and Levertov is transferred to Schindler’s factory.

The next story is about the boy we saw in Act II, protecting the girl in glasses during the liquidation sequence (the boy who knows how to put them in “the good line”). A chicken has been stolen, and Goth shoots a man at random, threatening to keep shooting until someone confesses. The boy steps forward and tearfully confesses that the dead man is, in fact, the one who stole the chicken. For this act of bravery/chutzpah, Schindler gives Stern a cigarette case, the cigarette case goes to Goldberg, and Goldberg puts the boy on the rolls of Schindler’s factory.

The third story, which is a little more complicated, involves a woman who got out of the ghetto before liquidation and has been hiding in the suburbs of Krakow. Her parents are in Plaszow and she wants them to be transferred to Schindler’s factory. She comes to see Schindler at his factory, and Schindler refuses to see her. She comes back again done up as a slut, and gains admittance. She pleads her case to Schindler, telling him that she’s heard that no one dies in his factory. Schindler is appalled by this news — while it’s true that he doesn’t murder workers at random, he apparently has no idea that he’s being played by Stern as a Jew-lover. Either that, or he’s aware he’s being played to some extent but he’s concerned that the woman is a German spy being sent to entrap him.

In either case, Schindler goes to Stern and explodes. He’s livid that Stern has put him in such an uncomfortable position, and even tells him that he needs to look at the situation from Goth’s point of view. Schindler, apparently, at this mid-way point of the movie, still sees Goth as a not-that-bad variation on himself — he doesn’t see that Goth is a sociopath who’s been let off the leash by a fiat of history, he sees him as an essentially good man who’s been put into a difficult situation. In any case, he gives his watch to Stern, who gives it to Goldberg, and the woman’s parents are sent to Schindler’s factory.

Schindler, in this trio of sequences, has made an incremental change in his outlook. He seems to think now that, at some level, he is responsible for the lives of his workers. Those lives, he sees, can be exchanged for things, if one is willing to work within the corrupt system that controls the whole situation.

1:38:30-1:55:45 – This final chunk of the act has two objectives — to tell the story of Helen Hirsch, the woman Goth has selected to be his housekeeper, and to give Goth a “last chance” to redeem himself. It begins and ends in Goth’s basement, with mirrored scenes of Schindler and his nemesis Goth interrogating Helen, and has a little mini-movie in the middle concerning Schindler’s attempt to rehabilitate Goth.

During yet another party at Goth’s, Schindler comes down to the basement to chat up Helen. At first we think he’s merely trying to get a leg over, but it seems that Schindler is turning over a new leaf — he’s become interested in people as people and he asks Helen to tell him her story. Once she does so, Schindler gives her a kind of benediction. This, to me, looks like Schindler’s on his own little power trip; he’s discovered that he, like Goth, has acquired the power of life and death, but he has decided to use his power for good and not evil.

His conversation with Helen leads him to go talk to Goth about the nature of the power they both share. He tries, in his best Qui-gon style, to bring Goth over to the light side and Goth, in a totally wasted state, seems willing to give it a try. He doesn’t kill his houseboy when he leaves the expensive saddle lying on the ground, he shrugs off the offense of a shirking worker, and he almost lets his houseboy off the hook when he uses the wrong cleaner in his bathtub. Then, upon reflection (literally — Goth makes the decision while looking in a mirror), Goth decides that mercy doesn’t really suit him and murders the houseboy.

Then, as though Goth has suspected all along that this narrative digression began with Helen, he storms down to the basement and confronts her. Goth’s problem with Helen, of course, is that he wants to screw her — for all we know, he’s in love with her, whatever that means to him. He can’t screw her because it goes against everything he stands for as a Nazi. Instead, he interrogates her, supplying all her answers for her, in a bizarre, self-serving monologue that reveals nothing of Helen but tunnels deep into his own brain, showing the tortured mental convolutions he must undergo in order to justify his true objective, the murder of innocent people.

This dark, psycho-sexual nightmare is intercut against a wholesome wedding scene in one of the Jewish barracks, and also a scene of Schindler enjoying “the good life” out in a nightclub. Schindler, it seems, even past the half-way point of the narrative, is trying to maintain a sense of order. While his workers run the risk of a bullet to the head on their way to work, Schindler has no trouble treating himself to a night of wine and song.

1:37-3:25 — The smoke from the extinguished candles cuts to the smoke billowing out of a locomotive’s smokestack as a train pulls into the station in Krakow. Obviously, smoke and trains will figure significantly in narrative to follow. The action of the scene is that Jews, forced by the Germans after the fall of Poland to re-locate to cities, are arriving in Krakow by the thousands to register with the German officials. The dramatization of the moment is a series of shots of Jews, liningup at folding tables, to recite their names for the German clerks, who type them up into lists. Smoke, trains, lines of Jews at folding tables in open spaces, Germans keeping careful track of the Jews’ names (“Name?” is actually the first line of dialog in the movie), and the list of names itself — all these motifs will be repeated in evolving contexts throughout the movie and they’re all here in the first scene.

The narrative of Schindler’s List is told mostly from Schindler’s point of view. It’s his gradual change from businessman to samaritan that the movie is concerned with. Therefore, the “plight of the Jews” in these early scenes is given relatively little importance. It is, dramatically speaking, “the weather,” the situation the protagonist is entering into. That is, Spielberg pares the information back to all we absolutely need to know to understand the protagonist’s pursuit. We don’t need to see Claudius plotting to kill Hamlet’s father, we only need to know that Hamlet is pissed off that his father is dead.

3:25-4:28 — A man gets ready for a night on the town. We see him select his tie, loot his wardrobe for spare cash, and pin his Nazi Party pin to his lapel.

4:28-5:17 — The man enters a nightclub. He heavily tips the maitre-d for a good table. The man, like Spielberg, is a manipulator of image — he wants to frame himself a certain way, present a certain impression.

5:17- 10:15 — The man scans the nightclub, looking resplendent and predatory. What is his prey? Well, here comes a comely blond lass. The man takes a drag on his cigarette (smoke again) and stares lustfully at the woman as she passes. And while we will soon find out that the man is a notorious womanizer, Spielberg here pulls a typically Spielbergian stunt — he “stands the idea on its head” and makes it that the man is not staring at the woman at all, he’s staring at the Nazi she walked in with. He didn’t come to this nightclub to seduce women but to seduce Nazis.

(Spielberg’s friend Brian DePalma put it thus in Scarface: “First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women.”)

And so the man, who is eventually identified as Oskar Schindler, pursues his agenda of “buying the friendship of local Nazis.” He watches each influential officer, notes his predilections, and caters to them, providing women, wine and song and receiving their patronage in return.

But of course we don’t know that yet.

Now think about this sequence for a moment. Here’s what is not shown: Oskar Schindler at home in Germany, bursts in the door and says to his wife “Honey, I’ve got a great idea! You know that old enamelware factory in Krakow? Well, now that the Nazis have conquered Poland, I have a unique opportunity to buy that factory and make mess kits for the German army. We’ll be rich! Rich, I tell you!” And Mrs. Schindler says “But Oskar, however will you do it? We don’t have that kind of money.” And Schindler says “It’s wartime, babe, all the rules go out the window in wartime.” And Mrs. Schindler says “I don’t know, Oskar, it sounds mighty risky.” And Schindler says “Aw babe, don’t you get it, this is my big chance, I can finally make something of myself and impress your father.” And Mrs. Schindler says “Oh Oskar, you know I can’t resist you when you have some crazy, pie-in-the-sky moneymaking scheme. Just promise me that when you’re in Krakow, no running around with the local ladies, okay?” And Schindler saying “I love you, Mrs. Schindler. Kiss me.”

That scene would be in any other bio-pic, mostly because for most movies, there’s always someone at the beginning of the movie-making process who says “But we don’t know what the protagonist wants, we need his big ‘I want’ scene so we can root for him.” But as we’ve seen with No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, the fact that the characters simply pursue their goals without explaining themselves is always much more dramatically interesting.

(That, and, of course, Spielberg doesn’t want us to “root” for Schindler exactly, not at this point of the narrative anyway.)

As Schindler discusses wine with the nightclub’s sommelier, we hear a couple of Nazis griping about the matter of governing Poland. This subtle, background exchange is the thin edge of a wedge that will become more prominent later: that for the Nazis of Schindler’s List, their activities are, essentially, “just business.” The Nazi officers in Schindler’s List talk about their occupation of Krakow and their treatment of the Jews primarily in terms of paperwork and bureaucracy, rarely in terms of hatred. (The hatred gets revealed in other ways, as we will see.)

10:15-14:45 — Spielberg cuts from Schindler leading the Nazis in a cabaret sing-along to German soldiers in the city singing a martial song. We get a little more “weather” as we see Germans harassing Jews as Schindler walks through the streets.

(There are those who complain that Schindler’s List does Jews a disservice by making them minor characters in the movie. And it’s true that the movie largely centers on Schindler’s story and tends to tell the story of “the Jews” as just that — a relatively undifferentiated mass of humanity, and helpless without a powerful, sympathetic friend to “save” them. What I see is Spielberg approaching the Holocaust the same way he approaches any other subject: by asking “how do we stand the idea on its head?” In this case, he’s decided to make a “Holocaust movie” about a German businessman who’s just trying to make a little money off the war. His impulse is the same for Schindler’s List as it is for Close Encounters or Hook: “how do I make people see this story in a way they’ve never seen it before?” And in that regard, the commercial returns of Schindler’s List speak for themselves.)

We still don’t yet know what Schindler’s game is. He enters the Judenrat, a kind of Jewish community center, where relocated Jews can air their grievances and sort out legal problems. Hundreds of Jews are lined up to get into the Judenrat, in a line that stretches down the block, but Schindler, a German and a badge-wearing member of the Nazi Party, strides to the front of the line and heads inside.

The small glimpses of life on the streets of Krakow and inside the Judenrat give real weight and perspective to the scene that follows. It’s hard for us to imagine an entire population uprooted at the whim of an invading army and forced to relocate, and Spielberg imagines the practical scenes of daily life of this situation with a detail and precision he hasn’t reached since the community scenes of Jaws and Close Encounters.

Schindler has come to the Judenrat to find an accountant named Itzak Stern. Why Stern we are not told, apparently Schindler got his name from someone as someone who can get things done in the Krakow Jewish community.

Stern is presented as a, well, stern, solemn, “pure” man. (His first line of dialog is “I am.”) He functions as a kind of Jiminy Cricket to Schindler’s Pinocchio. As Schindler outlines his business scheme to Stern, Stern can barely contain his disapproval of Schindler and everything he represents. The drama of Schindler’s List largely hinges on Stern’s gradual approval of, friendship with, and eventual lionization of Schindler. This drama is characterized chiefly by Sterns unwillingness to share a drink with Schindler, and this scene is the first to bring up this motif.

In what I consider a pretty incredible scene, Schindler presents his scheme, which comes down to: I have the contacts, you know how to run a business and you know investors, lets all get rich off this crazy war thing. If Schindler is aware of the implications of the Nazi occupation of Krakow, he doesn’t show it. His attitude seems to be, this is the situation, we can suffer from it or we can profit from it — I, being a German member of the Nazi party, stand to profit from it much more greatly than you, but that’s the way things are, you want in or not?

The capitalist imperative is presented as purely amoral in the least perjorative sense of the word — what does it matter what the situation is, as long as we can make some money off it? Schindler will get his money, the Germans will get field kits, the Jewish investors will be able to trade pots and pans on the black market, “everybody’s happy,” it’s a win-win situation. Schindler, at this point in the narrative, is not a “bad” man, not an anti-semite, merely an opportunist. It’s his opportunism that suggested he join the Nazi party, it’s his opportunism that allows him to pursue his scheme of opening an enamelware factory in Krakow when he has virtually no capital, later it will be the same opportunism that will allow him to hire Jews instead of Poles to work at the factory.

14:55-17:32 — Jewish black-marketeers gather in the local Catholic church to conduct their business. We meet Pfefferberg and Goldberg, who will enter into the narrative later on as a kind of “Good Jew/Bad Jew” team — Pfefferberg will prefer to retain his honor and live as a prisoner, whereas Goldberg will gladly turn policeman for its opportunities for graft and kickbacks.

For a moment, it looks like the narrative is branching off into a new direction, but we’re with Pfefferberg and Goldberg for only a couple of minutes before Schindler enters the scene. He’s been at the church the whole time, apparently, scoping out the joint, looking for Jews exactly like Pfefferberg to acquire luxury goods on the black market — he needs “good things” to present to his Nazi contacts, to grease the wheels of the bureaucracy and get him his enamelware factory.

17:32-21:53 — The Jews enter the Krakow ghetto. As the mass of humanity flows through the streets, Spielberg takes care to show us a few faces that will become important later. He casts a boy with a winsome face and a little girl with round, horn-rim spectacles, knowing that we’ll remember those details and follow along with their stories. There is another scene of Jews standing in line to talk to Germans with clipboards sitting at folding tables in an open-air space, and another recital of names. Goldberg is now a policeman, Pfefferberg and his fiancee sneer and make fun of him.

We pay close attention to a wealthy Jewish family being uprooted from their luxury digs and herded into the street by Nazi soldiers. Why this family? Spielberg keeps us waiting for the answer. The father of the family, a framed picture under one arm, pries the mezzuzza off his front door and heads out to join the parade of Jews headed for the ghetto. No sooner are the family led away and pelted with mud by Polish onlookers then Schindler pulls up in his car and is squired about the apartment by a Nazi officer. So Spielberg does take moments to tell us of what’s happening to “the Jews” but he doesn’t want the story to get away from him — he makes sure that everyone he shows has a direct relation to his protagonist. He cuts between the wealthy Jewish family entering the deplorable conditions of the ghetto and Schindler relaxing, pleased as punch with his swanky new digs. Again, if Schindler understands that he’s taking over an apartment which was, only moments earlier, the property of someone else, he doesn’t show it — it’s all just more good stuff for the opportunist.

21:53-23:37 — The Jews have all moved into the ghetto. Stern introduces Schindler to the investors he knows. Again, it’s a scene about business — the investors try to negotiate with Schindler, but Schindler knows he’s got the upper hand and refuses to cave. Again, he’s not an anti-semite, he’s just pursuing his goal of making a ton of money and the local situation puts his business partners at a disadvantage. This scene also features Schindler’s second attempt to get Stern to share a drink with him.

23:37-24:30 — The capital secured, the enamelware factory starts production. Schindler hires Jews from the ghetto not because he intends to “save” them, but because they cost him less money (and he pays them through the Nazi bureaucracy, which benefits his business). They are, literally, “worth less.” Money and life present themselves in stark terms when one can literally say that one kind of person is worth less than another kind, and Schindler, the opportunist, is happy to go along with the prevailing wisdom.

24:30-29:00 — Stern, now in place to run Schindler’s enamelware factory, canvases the ghetto looking for likely prospects. As the Jews are being sorted into categories by the Nazis (so many scenes of sorting people out in this movie) Stern sees that everyone who isn’t working at the factory is in danger of being put on the wrong list and pulls a number of ruses and schemes to get teachers and historians and musicians jobs at the factory. This is one of the few times we leave Schindler to see what Stern is doing behind his back, and we see that Stern is something of a canny opportunist himself — he’s hiring friends and aesthetes for jobs in a metalworking plant.

29:00-30:45 — We get a moment of character development and comic relief as Schindler auditions women to be his secretary. He plays close attention to the pretty young things who hunt and peck their way through the typing test and sits bored as a middle-aged batte-axe efficiently chugs along, easily besting them. So we also learn that Schindler has an eye for the ladies and is, in fact, a thoroughly shallow man, his knowledge of French wines and cognac notwithstanding. At the end of the brief sequence, Stern tells Schindler “you have to choose.” He’s talking about picking a secretary, but, as with many things Stern says to Schindler, the line carries a double meaning. You can’t, he implies, sit on the fence through this war, making your money and chuckling at your cleverness, you have to pick a side. Schindler, however, is still an opportunist and decides to hire all the auditioners — except, of course, the battle-axe.

30:45-33:00 — Schindler promotes his newly-opened enamelware factory. He’s almost to his goal — he’s made the contacts, raised the capital and staffed his factory, now he just needs to close the deal and get his lucrative army contracts. This he accomplishes by throwing banquets for his Nazi friends and sending baskets of luxury food items to all the officers we saw earlier in the nightclub sequence. The sequence ends with a series of shots of Nazi hands placing their official stamps on Schindler’s contracts — the bureaucracy again, the “business” of the Nazis showing its hand.

His goal achieved, there is a brief scene where Schindler calls Stern to his office and makes a third attempt to get him to drink with him. This time, Stern lifts the glass (on command) but still refuses to drink. Schindler’s moment of self-congratulation is soured and Schindler brusquely throws Stern out of his office. You can see that Stern is gettng to Schindler, you can see Schindler thinking “Christ, what is it with this guy? I give him a job, I give all his friends jobs, I make his rich friends’ lives easier, what does he want from me?” This question ends the act and points the way forward for the narrative.